Ethereum’s Constantinople Hard Fork Set for November Release

The complexity and uncertainty over Ethereum’s scalability solution have been growing! Ethereum enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting the next big system-wide upgrade of the Constantinople hard fork. Last week, Ethereum developers announced their plans to postpone Constantinople’s release on the test network Ropsten. The release date of the hard fork is now shifted to the next month of November.

However, in a bi-weekly developers meeting on Friday, October 12, open-source coders backing this project said that it is very much on time. Attendees of yesterday’s meeting said that the upgrade has been already coded in all major Ethereum clients, including those by U.K. startup Parity and Ethereum Foundation.

During the meeting call, developers said that the upgrade is most likely to go live this year itself. However, they have yet to finalize a date wherein the activation time, which gets triggered at a particular block, will be integrated into the code. The upcoming Constantinople hard fork brings five backward-incompatible changes to the Ethereum network. This includes mining code optimizations to some of the complex and controversial changes like reducing the mining rewards for the block transactions.

All the changes are implemented in the form of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). All of these five EIPs introduce changes that include: fairer pricing structures for changes made to smart contract data storage; code optimizations to improve processing times for developers; changes to ethereum’s economic policy; and a code edit making scaling solutions through state channels easier to occur on ethereum.

Note that before releasing the Constantinople upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet, it needs to undergo a smooth release on the Ethereum testnet called Ropsten which is a primary platform for testing the new code. The release on Ropsten is scheduled for tomorrow, October 14, Sunday.

Earlier the testnet release was scheduled to last week which has been postponed to tomorrow after a bug was discovered in one of the five changes of Constantinople. But during yesterday’s call meeting, several software clients confirmed that they are ready to move ahead with the testing process.

In a word with CoinDesk, Hudson Jameson, a communications officer for the Ethereum Foundation, told “The core developers are excited about the upcoming testnet release of Constantinople. We are on the right track to hopefully release Constantinople on mainnet less than 1 month after Devcon.”

We hope that all goes smooth and fine with tomorrow testnet implementation of Constantinople so that we can proceed ahead with the mainnet launch by next month.